Moulin Rouge (12)

Rouged faces all round

Internal links

Read Anthony Quinn's review

Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge begins with a priceless bit of cheek: a conductor waves his baton and red curtains part in front of the Twentieth Century-Fox logo, as the orchestra strikes up "The Sound of Music" and the credits roll. What follows is a few minutes of sheer brilliance – a stylised visual overture that shows us a scratchy sepia panorama of Paris 1900, before the camera sweeps down from the sky, tears up the boulevards and straight into the hell-mouth of old Montmartre. It's a dazzling confrontation of trompe-l'oeil effects old and modern, confronting the silent-era illusionism of Georges Méliès with today's digital razzamatazz.

After that, however, you might as well pack up your opera glasses and leave. Moulin Rouge is a massive disappointment – not because it promises much and delivers little, but because it delivers too much of everything at once, without rhyme or reason, or rhythm or taste. The film is every bit as audacious as Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, yet for all its self-conscious cleverness, Moulin Rouge is wholly lacking in wit. It doesn't know when to leave a bad joke well alone, or when to give you half a minute's breather between flourishes. It's all so heavy-handed – the end-of-the-pier stabs at Feydeau farce, the poke-in-the-ribs innuendo, the sight gags underlined with zip! bang! boink! sound effects. This Moulin really puts you through the mill.

The film's one running gag is anachronism – a Belle Epoque that curiously resembles the present. The Moulin Rouge is a bit like today's rave palaces; its star performer Satine (Nicole Kidman) is a bit like Monroe and Madonna, her signature routine a medley of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" and "Material Girl"; and her jealous stage-door-johnny aristo (bleatingly hammed by Richard Roxburgh) is a bit like a Hollywood producer, changing the ending of her star vehicle. The theme is plus ça change – everything different made recognisable. Ewen McGregor's aspiring poet Christian has a cute habit of bursting into twentieth-century songs avant la lettre – droll enough when he first carols, "The hills are alive", less so when he delivers a litany of pop pieties ("Love is a many-splendoured thing! Love takes us up where we belong!"), and excruciating when the dialogue milks Elton John's "Your Song" over and over again.

Visiting Paris in 1899 ("the Summer of Love!"), Christian meets a crowd of goofy, gurning bohemians led by Toulouse-Lautrec (gratingly played by John Leguizamo with a Daffy Duck lisp). They're trying to get financial backing from the Moulin's proprietor Zidler (Jim Broadbent); he wants the Moulin to be a legit theatre, and Satine sees herself as the next Sarah Bernhardt, while Lautrec and chums just want to mount a spectacular floorshow. A sly comment on the way showbiz aspires to high art, while the avant-garde dabbles with pop culture? Not really – more an old-fashioned let's-put-on-a-show-right-here backstage musical, a Busby Berkeley La Bohème. Kidman's character is, of course, a tragic tubercular flower – and that's not the least of the film's conspicuous consumption.

Given the dearth of original songs, Moulin Rouge is less a musical proper than a concert-party revue, the story a thin pretext for tarted-up pop standards. As a musical, Moulin Rouge is both an egregious dud and something of a con. It promotes itself as relentlessly chic and down with club culture, quickly opening fire with a grinding techno blitzkrieg of "Lady Marmalade" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit". But the hip veneer soon falls off and the film shows its real allegiance to the leaden, lachrymose solemnity of Lloyd Webber, songs like Bowie's "Heroes" drizzled with violins till they sound like Orchestral Gold.

Considering the visual overkill, Luhrmann oddly seems to have little faith in pictures. There's plenty to be dazzled by in Donald McAlpine's rich, vertiginous photography, and in Catherine Martin's outlandishly lavish designs: a sumptuous elephant-shaped boudoir, glittering night skies, torrid flamingo pinks and reds. I could happily have gazed longer at the black sea of gents in tailcoats with shirtfronts like white sails; or the petticoats tossed around like oils in a feverish action painting; or just the first close-up of a porcelain-pale Kidman. Yet as soon as there's anything to look at, Luhrmann whisks it away; Jill Bilcock's editing is as pointlessly flashy as juggling with chainsaws. The worst casualty of this haste is the choreography: Caroline O'Connor performs what might have been a pulse-quickening tango, if only we'd been allowed to see it.

The lead duo make far too bland a centre for this frenzy. McGregor is personable in a soft Dick Powell way, with a light singing voice that would see him safely through a winter season of The Student Prince. Kidman, though, is too decorous for her brassy but classy poule de luxe – she's like Aloof Nicole From Marketing letting her hair down at karaoke, and is considerably upstaged by Kylie Minogue's Tinkerbell-like Spirit of Absinthe (the 1890s version of Fairy Liquid). The only really whole-hearted performance is Jim Broadbent's Zigler, rude and rubicund in Vulcan's whiskers, bellowing away like a larky satyr on a show-stopping knees-up of "Like a Virgin".

Even though excess is the point of the exercise, the film would have had a lot more sparkle if Luhrmann hadn't slapped everything on with a diamanté-studded trowel. He missed one trick, though: when McGregor finally repairs to his lonely garret to type up his tragic tale, surely he should be singing, "Gonna write a classic, gonna write it in an attic".

j.romney@independent.co.uk